Professional armies attempt to dehumanize the enemy in order to make it easier for young, inexperienced soldiers to kill them without hesitation or regret. Armies usually accomplish this by citing the horribly uncivilized behavior of "the enemy." Ironically, the American public makes it easy for terrorists to kill without hesitation or regret by dehumanizing itself with routine displays of its own horribly uncivilized behavior. Here are a few of their stories.

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Chicken Soup with the Health Insurance Industry

Terrorists can avoid feeling guilty about killing Americans by emulating the behavior of health insurance executives.

When you call the fire department they don't ask you if you have insurance or how you're going to pay for their services and no one suggests that you shop around for the best price while your home is being consumed by flames. They get there as fast as they can, save as many lives as they can, and save your home if possible. And they don't add insult to injury by billing you after the fire is out. Saving your life and your home is considered a public service, paid for by taxes.

For reasons that baffle the civilized mind, our health insurance industry is still a for profit business that routinely condemns thousands of Americans to death or to an existence defined by horrible suffering simply because it isn't profitable to do otherwise. The value of any individual human life is valued according to the economic net worth of that individual.

Terrorists can sleep soundly knowing that many of America's leading business people, politicians, lobbyists, and attorneys...and millions of ordinary voters place no more value on the lives of their fellow Americans than terrorists do.

4 comments:

Interestingly enough there was a news story a few years back about a man who lived in an unincorporated part of a town in the south. In this section of the city they had to pay fire department dues. He failed to pay these dues and when his house caught on fire, the department was ordered to do nothing.

The firefighters, just to be clear, wanted to stop the fire, but the higher ups ordered them not to. None of this is meant to attack your argument, indeed all it does is re-enforce it.

That story sounds like the basis for a hefty lawsuit. Drawing from my sparse legal knowledge, the proper course of action would have been to put out the fire and then attach a municipal lien on the property in order to recover costs. Conciously deciding to allow the structure to burn could have burned them all, legally anyway. If a child had been horribly burned, he or she would have been paraded by the media and about a million bloggers as an example of barbarity. The local officials who gave the order probably would have become quite infamous.

This story does illustrate the dollar value Americans place on human life and allows criminals of all kinds, including terrorists to rationalize the moral acceptability of their chosen profession.

Had commented in my blogs about a US County Fire Dept that chose to allow a house to burn down because the owners had not paid the annual levy ! Those living in the USA are treated as nonenties by the insurance companies whose only purpose is to make a profit out of their plight ! Time ALL US citizens came together and demanded their Politicians treat ALL as equals for healthcare !